As a result of major cutbacks aimed at “establishing a foundation for our future operations,” New Zealand Post has announced today that the entire nation’s mail will now be delivered by a single postal worker.
23-year-old Jermaine Davis, who found that he was the only remaining mailperson in the country not issued with a redundancy notice, reports that the job description in his new contract reads, simply, “Deliver the mail.”
Having conferred with management about the contract, Davis established that the description was indeed literal.
“Yep, all of the mail,” he clarified, before sighing and staring dejectedly into space. “Shit.”
Defending the cutbacks today, chairman of NZ Post Sir Michael Cullen said that the new number of mail delivery workers was “carefully calculated,” and best reflected the volume of physical mail still being sent throughout New Zealand.
“I think people tend to assume that, just because we hired thousands of mail delivery workers across the country, we had these large volumes of mail,” he said. “But that just wasn’t the case. Physical mail today isn’t what it used to be. There’s really only a few kinds of mail you get. There’s letters from grandparents, birthday cards from grandparents, newspaper clippings from grandparents; and other than that it’s just bank statements and junk mail, which we find tends to deliver itself.”
Cullen acknowledged that he was no longer Deputy Prime Minister, and that sometimes during interviews this was awkward.
He explained that while Davis might seem “hard done by,” he had actually been given a slight pay increase, and provided with a small aircraft to help cover the wider region for which he was now responsible.
But Davis says he isn’t licensed to pilot an aircraft, and that while his new contract did mention a pay increase, he hasn’t been paid in months, “because of the government shutdown.”
“They told me that my pay hadn’t come through because John Boehner wouldn’t vote to fund the Government,” he explained. “They said I couldn’t get paid anymore. Ever.”